Essence Of Spirituality In Today’S Indian Classical Dance

Hello everyone!
Afew days back I came across this article that showed up in one of my whatsapp groups. It was about ‘Has Indian classical dance lost it’s spiritual purpose?’

Click here to read the article
So, this is my take on the article in terms of spirituality. I found it to be a bit contradicting with certain ideologies that exist in today’s world and some that me and my circle tend to believe, which, I’m sure most will agree.

This is a pretty vast and deep topic for an amateur like me to comment about.. But from what I could understand, this is my point of view. Yes, I agree the essence of divinity and spirituality has degraded many folds. But I would also say that we, the current young artistes are not entirely responsible for it. It was the time we were exposed into the artistic world (nascent stages of art getting into us and from there onwards..).

I would like to list out some factors for the word ‘time’ here..
1.There was no gurukulam system but only a mere 1 hour dance “class” (addressed by almost everyone).

2.Academics that threw light upon devadasi system in a way that only its negatives were highlighted. We learnt that it was a practiced social evil that was abolished. I’m pretty sure 90% of our generation would not know the positives(as mentioned in the article). Moreover, even ‘devadasi’ evolved to be a swear word over time. Despite all this mess, finding the goodness of that system which gave birth to Naayta felt impossible until someone had to put up a powerpoint presentation to actually tell us.

3. People then were 100% devoted to their field of art. But now as we all know it is school or college and ‘extra – curriculars’ not by choice but by society’s law.

4. Most of us here have parallel professions and we tend to choose the one we get more income to satisfy our daily needs as cost of living has exponentially gone up since those times.

5. Different standards of spirituality varying amongst various individuals.
6. When you you feel spirituality and divinity and your bhakti towards naatya (or any other field) alone is not enough because you go unnoticed especially when you are taking it up as a profession, as people around you are way more competitive (seeing the number of advertisements saying ‘Vidyarambham admissions open’ in news papers). And also that sense of fear.. fear of going unnoticed makes you do things like for example, shows to get name, fame, money etc.. here that person may or may not lose his sense of divinity. It depends. Maybe according to him, propagating art to many people around the world, “globe trotting” would be an ideology of spirituality.

7. The article also said ‘many artistes were unknown and only recently they were discovered and have been made history’.. but.. what if.. they weren’t discovered at all? What if there’s so much more we haven’t discovered? If we don’t spread naatya (definitely not commercially though), in 1000 years would there be anyone to even care to discover it? With this growing fan base towards western culture?

Hence, I feel we are trying to be the best of both worlds which definitely has some compromises and if theories show that spirituality is the one finally being compromised, it is time to rework our balance.

~ Sushmita Rajtilak